Lucky
by Blue Zombie
Summary: Craig's 21 and retraumatized on the road with his band, bringing about all the memories of the things he wanted so badly to forget.
1. Chapter 1

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Craig 21 years old

They said I was lucky as I laid in that hospital bed with IV's in my arm and the oxygen tubing in my nose and the foley catheter in my bladder but despite that I always felt like I had to pee. The nurses would explain it over and over that it went into that bag and I was fine. Pain meds around the clock. Beaten within an inch of my life, a knife to the kidney and I lost it. I was lucky because I had two.

This was lucky? Not being dead was lucky? Not being crippled. I'd be fine, more or less. Not like when Jimmy got shot that time in school, paralyzed from the waist down. No lasting injuries, I heard the doctors telling Joey. And he cried and said thank God and I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.

I sometimes have a hard time dealing with Joey's brand of sympathy. I don't know. His face gets all crumpled in concern and I just feel engulfed in it. Swept along by it. And there's nothing I can do.

I suppose I should feel grateful for the stream of visitors. Angie and Joey, of course. My entire band, wandering in stoned, mumbling about deities and obscenities, "Jesus Christ, dude, what the fuck?" they'd say, and I could smell the pot wafting around them like perfume. But I was on much better drugs. I'd been high for days. It was almost worth almost being killed. That was lucky.

There was no end to this hospitalization in sight. Losing a kidney was quite a big deal. My temperature was up and down, fighting off infection after infection. My psych meds were all out of whack. Joey visited every day, coaxing me to talk, which I haven't been doing much of since the thing. The attack. Vicious and unprovoked, the papers said. But it didn't surprise me. Violence had a way of finding me.

I was getting pretty bored with this room. There was this border, like x's made out of ribbons that swirled all around the top edge of the room and I'd follow it with my eyes until I got dizzy. And there were prints of cheesy paintings, twirling ballerinas on one wall and some thick medieval forest on another wall, and with the lights on the glare off the glass frame obscured half of it anyway.

Joey wanted me to talk to the police but I didn't want to. I'd talked to the police about that homeless kid, Skinny. What good had that done? They didn't find him. He had my 4000 dollar guitar. What would I say to the police anyway? I didn't remember any of it.

"Craig, please. Eat," Joey, sitting by my bed. There was a tray of food but I hadn't touched it. I opened my eyes at his voice but looked at him like I was dazed, out of it, glazed with pain. And I was all those things. But inside I was clear, and I didn't want to eat. I had the IV stuck in my arm. Let that keep me alive. I was tired of doing it.

"Craig. Hey, buddy. C'mon. Say something," Joey broke my heart. He held my hand, too, kind of clumsily patting the top of it. He was scared for me. So of course I wanted to please him.

"Wh-what, J-Joey?" I said, forcing the words out past the stutter. Since the attack I haven't been able to hardly speak without stuttering. The doctors said it might go away in time but it might not. I knew from what I heard them say that they didn't really understand stuttering all that well. Maybe it was from head trauma to the language center of the brain. Maybe it was from emotional trauma of being beaten and nearly killed. From being lucky. Maybe both. They didn't know.

"I just, I wanted to hear you say something. I'm worried," Joey, stating the obvious. I nodded. The less talking the better.

"So will you eat?" he said, and I caught the pleading look in his eyes. I remember he had looked at my mother just that way before she died. Maybe I was dying, too. Maybe I wasn't as lucky as everyone thought. But that look got me. I reached out for the fork with the hand that didn't have the IV, but it was the left so I was clumsy. I told myself that's why I was clumsy, and the fork felt like it weighed 20 pounds. I got a bit of the hospital mashed potatoes on the fork, and they were kind of like school mashed potatoes, that perfect half of a softball. I put the small bite in my mouth and chewed it dutifully while Joey watched me and smiled the smallest smile I'd ever seen.


	2. Chapter 2

What was it that made me think I was safe in the world? I'd never really had that thought before. The world was always fraught with danger. People died. People hit and beat you. People deserted you. That had been my experience. Then, somehow, it had faded. Those sharp lessons had become dulled. Worn away by my years of living with Joey and Angie, of feeling safe and loved, of not being hit and not being hurt.

I was kind of piecing together what had happened. We were at this club, one of those trendy little nightclubs, and it was after the show because I remembered the show. My voice cracking on the high notes but I was flawless on the guitar. I could see the drunk girls in the first row, leaning up against drunk guys. The lights were low except on the stage where they were too bright, blinding me, shining in my eyes. I could really only see the people in the audience near the stage. Everyone else was in shadows, featureless. And the show ended and most of the people drifted out into the streets, to their cars, weaving drunkenly. Holding empty bottles of beer. And the roadies and the band brought the equipment out to the van, and somehow I was alone in the club. Everyone else was…somewhere else. There was the back door where we'd been carrying all our stuff to the van and I went through it, it was painted red, the paint cracking and bubbling and chipping. I pressed on that door to open it and I could feel the thick paint under my hand, how it was dusty and sticky at the same time and then I went out into the alley behind the club and that's all. That's all I remember before waking up in the hospital.

I was so blank when I woke up in the hospital. Nothing made sense, not where I was, not what I was feeling, not even who I was. I felt absent from myself. I tried to move but there was this sharp pain. I knew I was in a hospital. I saw the metal rails of the hospital bed I was laying in, I saw the medical equipment, the IV poles and the IV bags and the machines with their flashing red numbers. I swallowed and my mouth felt dry, my throat felt closed. The first thought that filtered in after the blankness was that my dad had hurt me. My dad. I really believed this for a awhile, completely forgetting that he had been dead for seven years. Completely forgetting that I wasn't 14.

"Craig?" Joey's soft worried voice, and hearing and seeing Joey snapped me out of the thought that my father was responsible for this. My father was dead, I knew that. He'd never hurt me this bad, hospital bad.

"Craig?" He came over to me, and I looked into his worried eyes. I didn't feel like I could speak, like there was not enough air to form the words. But he wanted me to speak, I could intuit it. He was willing me to speak so I tried.

"Wh-, wh-, wha-t?"

"Craig, you're gonna be okay," he said. It seemed a funny thing to say. I'd be okay, but I wasn't then. Something was wrong. I was in a lot of pain, I felt like I couldn't move hardly at all. The one word I said I'd had to push out, force it out, and it had taken so much energy.

A nurse came in, I thought she was a nurse. It was hard to tell because staff at hospitals kind of dress alike now in these formless scrubs. But this girl had walked in and Joey looked up at her.

"He's awake," he said, looking to her to know what to do with that new development.

"He is?" she said, and I heard the optimism in her tone. She knelt by my bed so she was on eye level with me.

"Hi," she said, and I saw that she was patient, waiting to see what I'd say and how long it would take me to say it. She had this agenda to get information in this conversation, I could see it in her face.

"H-, hi,"

"What's your name?" she said, waiting, waiting.

"C-Craig,"

"Craig what?" She had bright eyes, and they rested on mine and then glanced away and back again.

"Ma-ma-manning," Shit. Talking was exhausting.


	3. Chapter 3

I was used to being hurt. My dad, I mean, the things he used to do to me. That didn't go away, the memory of those things. The memory of the fear. Thrown down, pushed against walls, kicked and punched and strapped. Just the wrong kind of look from him was enough to get my heart racing. And it bled from him to everybody else. Anyone's sudden movements and I flinched or jumped. Anyone's anger made me feel that thready adrenaline and oxygen less feeling, like I couldn't breathe. Because I knew what anger meant. I knew what a sudden movement could result in.

So for years I watched Joey try to undo all those responses that were ingrained in me. I knew what he was trying to do, what he was trying to get me to see. But my head knew it. Intellectually I knew that I didn't have to worry about Joey shoving me against the wall because the dishes weren't done or I came home late. It was my body that couldn't unlearn what it had been taught year by year, beating by beating.

So did the shadow of my father's abuse make this better or worse? This laying here trapped in a hospital bed, almost paralyzed by pain and those pain meds hardly touched it. Watching blood fill up that bag the urine went into. Watching it with this sick feeling, thinking maybe I was dying or something.

Joey comes to visit me every day. He's faithful. Angie comes a lot of times, too. She looks at me with her little worried eyes. It isn't new worry. I've made people worry for a long time.

"Hi, Craig," A nurse walked into my room. I was learning to differentiate the staff. I could tell nurse from nurse's aid from doctors. And I knew what they did, too. Nurse's aids took vital signs, emptied the foley bag, brought in the trays of food. Nurses listened to my lungs and asked me if I was in pain. They started IV's and gave me all the meds I took here. Doctors examined everything, asked about everything. I didn't really like seeing any of them, except maybe the nurses. They gave out the drugs.

The pain was all the words you could use to describe pain. Stabbing, throbbing, aching, dull. It was all these at once. But sometimes the nurses or the doctors or someone would realize, after I'd told them a hundred times that it _hurt_, they'd realize I needed more pain meds. They'd realize that I was actually in pain and not "med seeking". This was a bad thing. It was a psych thing. When I was on the psych floors there were patients who would do that, constantly wanting some drug for something. And I was a recovered drug addict. They knew that, all of them. The psychiatrists, the surgeons, the interns, the nurses, the nurse's aids. Probably the friggin' housekeepers knew it. They knew it because it was in my chart, like being bipolar, like being physically abused as a child. They knew everything.

"H-hi," I said to her, and she smiled at me. Some of them were really nice. They were a little different from psych nurses, though. They were a little less calculating. More concrete, maybe. Like this nurse who came in, I knew pretty much what she was thinking about. Pain, the foley output, what I ate, vital signs. That shit. She wasn't so concerned with what was in my head, like was I being manic or having racing thoughts or any of that.

"Are you having any pain?" she said, looking at me with this professional compassion. It was sort of this detached compassion. It was weird.

"Y-ye- yeah," Fuck. I couldn't say one goddamn word without stuttering. I felt like such a freak. After a million questions we got through the pain discussion and she went off to get the drugs. This was intense pain and the pain meds they gave me had to be narcotics, and narcotics have the nice little side effect of getting you high. I'd been good after the cocaine mess and rehab. I hadn't relapsed at all. And cocaine wasn't a narcotic, it was a stimulant. And of course I wished this hadn't happened because, because I almost died and all of this shit and it sucked almost all of the time. But right after I get that nice shot of whatever form of morphine that they're giving me, right after that, it's kinda nice.

It's nice to just float on this wave of endorphins, feeling the pain disappear, its absence so startling and wonderful. And it's nice not to care so goddamn much about everything for just a few seconds, minutes, hours. Time kind of stretches out and fades away as the morphine derivative courses through my bloodstream. So I was almost killed, so what? So I don't remember at all what happened, so I had no idea what they did or didn't do. So what? Everyone gets hurt, we all try to destroy each other. That's just a part of life, so what does it matter what they did?


	4. Chapter 4

I was getting better. The damn foley was finally out. The nurse took it out a couple of days ago. She said it wouldn't hurt and it didn't, really. It was just this thin flexible tube that slid out. But I closed my eyes when she took it out and was aware that she wasn't that much older than me, and that she was seeing things I'd prefer she didn't see. But being in the hospital wasn't about privacy. I knew that.

And the stuttering was getting better. It wasn't gone, but it was better. And the bruises and cuts had all mostly healed and so I was ready to go. Joey came to pick me up.

I was dressed in real clothes for the first time in I didn't know how long, and it felt good. The baggy jeans and old faded rock T-shirt felt so normal.

"Ready to go?" the doctor said. She was a tiny lady from India, and her words were softly twisted with her accent. I nodded. I still tended to nod if that would suffice, so I wouldn't have to stutter out yes. Joey was at the nurses' desk taking care of paper work. I sat in the visitor's chair in the corner of the room. The bed was made, the tray table neatly hovering over it. The I.V. pole was still in here, standing silent as a sentry in the other corner.

"Good luck," she said, and I lowered my head. Good luck, that's what Holden Caulfield hated for people to say to him. But I guessed I could use some.

"Craig," Joey came into the room, holding a bag of prescriptions and discharge instructions.

"H-hey, Joey," I said, standing up. I felt a little dizzy, not too bad. Just a little dizzy. I hung onto the arm of the chair until it passed.

"You okay?" Joey said, holding onto my arm. I tightened up but didn't pull away, and despite the dark stars in front of my eyes I thought I was okay.

"Yeah," I said, and in that one word there was more than that. 'Don't worry so much', and under that, 'leave me alone,'

I knew what was in store. Joey would want me to take it easy, and I didn't feel like I could do much more. All my movements were kind of slow and deliberate, and I was still on the pain meds. There was a wheelchair waiting to wheel me out to the car, a volunteer pushing it and making small talk. The volunteers were old guys, gray haired, a little stooped over. He talked to Joey, mostly, but would apologize to me if we went over the separation of one hallway from another and it jostled the wheelchair, causing me to wince in pain.

In the car Joey smiled at me, and the smile looked plastic and almost frightening. I smiled back. I wanted to go home. I'd had enough of that place.


End file.
